Jennifer Tipton

Lighting designer

Biography

American lighting designer Jennifer Tipton is a leading figure in her field and has created worked on several productions at the Royal Opera House, including Liam Scarlett's Asphodel Meadows and The Age of Anxiety, Christopher Wheeldon's DGV: Danse à grande vitesse, Peter Wright's staging of Giselle and George Balanchine's Jewels for The Royal Ballet and Ariadne auf Naxos, directed by Christof Loy, and Aida, directed by David McVicar, for The Royal Opera. She created the original lighting for several Jerome Robbins ballets now in the repertory of The Royal Ballet, including In the Night, Dances at a Gathering and The Concert.

Tipton was born in Ohio and studied at Cornell University. She studied lighting for dance with Thomas Skelton and has since won acclaim around the world for her work in dance, theatre and opera. Her many credits include, in dance, Alexei Ratmansky’s Shostakovich Trilogy for American Ballet Theatre; in theatre, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s In a Year with 13 Moons, adapted and directed by Robert Woodruff at the Yale Repertory Theater; and in opera, L’elisir d’amore for the Metropolitan Opera, New York, directed by Bart Sher and La clemenza di Tito for Lyric Opera of Chicago, directed by McVicar.

Tipton teaches lighting at the Yale School of Drama. Among her many awards are the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, 2001, and the Jerome Robbins Prize, 2003. In 2008 she was made a United States Artist ‘Gracie’ Fellow and a MacArthur Fellow.